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The Letters attributed to Socrates

Author

Listed:
  • Marco Donato

    (BSB - Burgundy School of Business (BSB) - ESC Dijon-Bourgogne, CEREN - Centre de Recherche sur les Entreprises - BSB - Burgundy School of Business (BSB) - ESC Dijon-Bourgogne)

Abstract

We know that Socrates did not write anything. Nevertheless, our manuscripts preserve a series of seven epistles attributed to him. This small and curious corpus has been known to modern scholars at least since Leo Allatius' edition in 1637, but suffered lack of attention, due to the evident inauthenticity of the collection, especially after Bentley's studies on pseudepigraphy in ancient epistolography. Excluding rare exceptions, scholars dealing with the Socratic tradition have all but ignored these materials. Decades after Ioannes Sykutris' explorations (1933), the first proper critical edition of the letters attributed to Socrates was established by Borkowski in 1997. The present communication will offer an overview of the corpus, which is composed by longer texts – such as 1, 6 and 7, dealing with subjects as politics, tyranny, and the relationship between virtue and wealth – and shorter ones, of lesser philosophical interest. The study will also deal with the presentation of Socrates in the letters, in comparison with the portraits dressed by Plato and Xenophon.

Suggested Citation

  • Marco Donato, 2024. "The Letters attributed to Socrates," Post-Print hal-05842676, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05842676
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